Masters of War from
Womankind (November 1971.)

(Editor's note: The women's liberation movement was universally appalled
by the war on SE Asia. This article focuses on women and the war.)

An
American GI, in a Saigon hotel, had just finished with a Vietnamese
prostitute. He had given her the money and was about to get dressed.
She suddenly asked him, Why are you murdering my people?
He couldnt answer. He was caught literally with his pants
down. A friend of mine told me this story three years ago. It had
happened to him and he wanted to talk about it.

The
wife of an American POW, a pilot shot down over North Vietnam,
was recently on a TV talk show. She said it was a disgrace that
the North Vietnamese fed her husband mostly rice and she urged
people to write to Hanoi. I guess most women were supposed to sympathize
with her. I did, but I sympathized more with the Vietnamese prostitute.
It seemed a little arrogant to be asking the North Vietnamese to
feed the men who dropped bombs on them better than they can feed
their own people.

Guilt
and arrogance: people have these feelings about the war in Vietnam.
Daniel Ellsbergs troubled conscience for his own part in Vietnam
policy was one reason he released the Pentagon Papers. Ever since
public disgust with the war has become obvious, politicians have
been scurrying around, trying to pin the blame on each other. But
if its guilt were seeing more and more evidence of these
days, lets be reminded that its arrogance weve
seen all along. The Pentagon Papers make one thing perfectly clear:

American
policy in Vietnam never had anything to do with democracy or selfdetermination
for the Vietnamese. Instead, from the beginning, the objectives
of our policy have been to contain China and to
set up a friendly government in South Vietnam. Friendly
meant one which would stand with the US in its struggle against
international communism and one which would allow US corporations
to exploit Vietnams resources. Some people call such a policy
imperialism.

The
Pentagon Papers also reveal that the men who run our country have
been assuming the world is their toy although none of their games
have worked as they hoped. In fact, most of those who now believe
the policy in Vietnam was wrong believe it was wrong because it
didnt succeed. The policy didnt work because the Vietnamese
refused to play along; namely, they refused to surrender.

The
Pentagon Papers show how as the war dragged on, the main policy
objective became something called the need to maintain American
credibility. As we were becoming stuck, our main objective
became not to back down. As President Johnson said, we werent
going to turn tail and run .

If you
never guessed the attitude of a drunken bully had anything to do
with American foreign policy, think about Vietnam. If you imagine
the bully to be a different race (say he is white) from the guys
he is fighting and you figure he is insisting upon his natural
superiority, you get an even better picture.

This
handful of men, our leaders, display the most outrageous
arrogance right now by continuing the war. We still have 200,000
soldiers there. Some wont come back. Government scientists
are busy figuring out how to automate the war so we can continue
to kill the enemy even after most of our boys have come
home.

Most
Americans have a right to be bitter about the war in Vietnam. Most
women have a special right to be bitter. We were never consulted.
We tried to hold our families together when husbands and fathers
got killed or hurt.

The
government didnt help very much. When men were listed as missing,
information was scanty and misleading. Many of us ended up on welfare
as a result of the war and now we must worry about losing that,
too. We tried to help the men; our brothers, friends, and lovers,
figure out how to rearrange their lives to either avoid or accommodate
military service  then wed adjust our lives accordingly.
When they came back from Vietnam wounded, strung out on drugs or
just plain emotional wrecks we were supposed to comfort them and
put the pieces back together.

We can
provide comfort for the returning soldiers but not for the men
who sent them to Vietnam. What these men tell their consciences
is their business. Our business is to see that it ends and never
happens again.